Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Stagecraft

The Swiss
psychologist Jean Piaget famously wrote about the stages of cognitive development and Freud described the anal and oral stages of infant and
childhood psychosexuality, amongst others. The latter is a concept that still continues to raise
eyebrows in a schizophrenic culture where increasingly permissive mores have
ignited the deep-rooted puritanism that has always been an undercurrent in
American life. Human development, of course, ends with death, which has its own
protocols. Both Kenneth Nuland and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote books with the
titles How We Die and On Death and Dying. But between
the stages of early development and the closing act which Shakespeare’s Jaques
describes so eloquently in As You Like It
(“Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second
childishness and mere oblivion: Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything”),lies a large spans of
time and possibility. Fifty Shades of
Gray, the title of an erotic romance, is also a good description of the
fine shadings that accompany senescence. “Do not go gentle into that good
night” urges Dylan Thomas. In fact hardly anybody departs this world without
following Thomas’s words to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The
end seems so near at some points, but can actually feel protracted, long and
almost boring. However, few people have the courage or desire to want to pull down the
curtain on their own performance even when they’ve said their piece and have
plainly overstayed their welcome.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.